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Anthony English is an independent contractor who solves expensive problems for businesses running IBM Power Systems.
He has written extensively about AIX and has been recognised for his contributions and thought leadership by being named an IBM Champion for Power Systems.

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In September 2009 Rob McNelly wrote on his AIXChange blog about Migrating from the IVM to the HMC . I have documented my own experience of this procedure. You can download it from here , at a very affordable price of USD 0.00 (no refunds). The IVM or Integrated Virtualization Manager, is a browser interface to the VIO server on smaller systems, and it has HMC-like functionality, such as Dynamic LPAR, the ability to configure LPARs, stop and start them and so on. The HMC (Hardware Management Console, as you know) is able to manage several... [More]

topas and nmon - what a performance! UPDATE: I'm grateful to Chris Gibson for highlighting some great new features available in topas for AIX 7.1 and AIX 6.1 TL 6: freeze the screen using the spacebar (spacebar melts your screen again) page up and page down to view several pages of data. See the comments for more details. The topas command is a very popular tool for checking performance of an AIX system. Another highly popular one is nmon (Nigel's monitor, so named because it was written by Nigel Griffiths, the man behind most of the excellent... [More]

FROM root TO padmin: THERAPY FOR AIXers When you log in to the VIO server as padmin, you are running the VIO server restricted shell. If you're a diehard AIX sysadmin who is frustrated by the VIOS command line, it can be difficult. Even a simple command like this: lsdev -Ccdisk Gives you a Usage message like this: Option flag is not valid. # dang! Usage: lsdev [-type DeviceType ...] [-virtual] [-state DeviceState] [-field FieldName ...] [-fmt delimiter] lsdev {-dev DeviceName | -plc PhysicalLocationCode} [-child] [-field FieldName ...]... [More]

NOW FOR THE I/O I highlighted some of the excellent AIX performance tuning resources here . They particularly dealt with memory and paging space. Now to I/O tuning. Fewer larger LUNs and checking queue_depth Jaqui Lynch has the follow up article in her two-part performance tuning series. This one's on Disk I/O and Network Tuning . She deals especially with queue_depth and explains why one great big LUN with lots of spindles may need to have this tuned: The trend in the industry right now is to provide fewer, larger hdisks to the server. For... [More]

There are some excellent resources on AIX performance and virtualisation which have turned up in the last week or so. Updated: Performance Monitoring Tips and Techniques Nigel Griffith's wiki on Performance Monitoring Tips and Techniques has a wealth of information on performance of AIX systems. The Wiki also includes a link to the downloads for the perfpmr tool , which allows you to get a snapshot of system performance before the problems occur. Managing Performance First,
Jaqui Lynch has done a great service with the first in a two-part... [More]

There are lots of good reasons for having spare disk for rootvg, as I
looked at in the post make
way for rootvg . With virtual disks you can resize your volume group
on the fly: Increase rootvg
dynamically If your rootvg “disk” is actually virtual,
such as a SAN LUN or a logical volume on the VIO server, then it usually
can be expanded on the SAN (or using extendlv on
the VIOS) and then recognised on the AIX LPAR using the -g flag
of the chvg
command : chvg -g
rootvg Note: this is supported for rootvg and... [More]

Fun out of the Sun In the last few days I've had lots of fun with migrations to AIX 6 and 7. And when I say "fun", I don't mean it in its usual technical sense within IT (insurmountable problems, unrelenting stress, obscure workarounds and chronic sleep deprivation). I mean "fun" according to its (almost obsolete) usage: &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;!--
@page { margin: 2cm }
P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
A:link { so-language: zxx... [More]